There’s no question that Mike Tyson has friends in high places. In just the past couple months, he battled The Game in an arm wrestle, he hung out with Ric Flair and Rick Ross at a cannabis conference, and he and Snoop Dogg have talked about their mutual love for the drug. It turns out that Tyson had many of his celebrity friends visit him when he was in prison.
In a recent interview with Drink Champs, the legendary boxer listed the multitude of big names who checked in on him during his three-year incarceration. According to Tyson, no one received a warmer welcome from his fellow inmates than 2Pac.
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2Pac visited Tyson early on in the boxer’s 1992-1995 stint in an Indiana prison, and upon entering the facility was shown an abundance of respect from its occupants. “Once he came into the visiting room—and there was all these hillbilly hicks, mean motherf***in’ Aryan guys—as soon as he came up everybody started clapping,” recalled Tyson. “They respected him, soon as he came in the room, they started applauding.”
Tyson and 2Pac had met six months before Tyson’s imprisonment in 1992. The young rapper was waiting outside an after-party at the Hollywood Palladium, and Tyson had invited him in. Apparently, 2Pac didn’t forget the kind gesture. When serving time, Tyson got an unexpected call. “It’s 2Pac’s mother,” he remembered. “She explains how she knows me from her son, explains that I met him at a club one night and that he wants to come and visit me. I said great, OK.”
2Pac was one of many of Tyson’s visitors. “I had everybody. B.B. King, James Brown, Whitney Houston… Florence Henderson. Everybody came,” claimed the boxer. “I can’t even name them all. Just so many people came to visit me.”
Check out the entire interview below.
[via]